How do I create a named temporary file on windows in Python?
- by Chris B.
I've got a Python program that needs to create a named temporary file which will be opened and closed a couple times over the course of the program, and should be deleted when the program exits. Unfortunately, none of the options in tempfile seem to work:
TemporaryFile doesn't have a visible name
NamedTemporaryFile creates a file-like object. I just need a filename. I've tried closing the object it returns (after setting delete = False) but I get stream errors when I try to open the file later.
SpooledTemporaryFile doesn't have a visible name
mkstemp returns both the open file object and the name; it doesn't guarantee the file is deleted when the program exits
mktemp returns the filename, but doesn't guarantee the file is deleted when the program exits
I've tried using mktemp1 within a context manager, like so:
def get_temp_file(suffix):
class TempFile(object):
def __init__(self):
self.name = tempfile.mktemp(suffix = '.test')
def __enter__(self):
return self
def __exit__(self, ex_type, ex_value, ex_tb):
if os.path.exists(self.name):
try:
os.remove(self.name)
except:
print sys.exc_info()
return TempFile()
... but that gives me a WindowsError(32, 'The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process'). The filename is used by a process my program spawns, and even though I ensure that process finishes before I exit, it seems to have a race condition out of my control.
What's the best way of dealing with this?
1 I don't need to worry about security here; this is part of a testing module, so the most someone nefarious could do is cause our unit tests to spuriously fail. The horror!
